Stories about network transformation tends to focus on capex, despite the fact that network operators have consistently indicated that opex is likely more important. One reason for this is that opex is one of those giant fuzzball sort of areas where you can make almost any claim and get the numbers to work in your…
Transformation in telecom means investment in something not currently being invested in, but it doesn’t likely mean “new” investment. Most operators have capital budgets that are based on return on infrastructure, which means that the sum of services supported by a network determines how much you spend to sustain or change it. One of the…
Cisco turned in a disappointing quarter, one that screams “Networking isn’t what it used to be!” for all with even mediocre ears. Juniper named a new CEO, one that the Street speculates may have been picked to squeeze more value for shareholders by cutting Juniper’s operating expenses. Such a move would seem to echo my…
Juniper may not have wowed the Street with its last earnings call, but with some of its rivals definitely closer to the drain, earnings-wise, and it’s clear Juniper still has assets in play. The latest Juniper move to leverage those assets is a new slant on the data center of the future, called “MetaFabric”. Unlike…
The NFV ISG released its first public documents in early October, but the most significant release was the details of its process for proof-of-concept demonstrations. PoCs are one of the things that I’ve believed from the first would be essential in making NFV a reality. Specifications don’t write software, and I think the IETF has…
I’ve been blogging over the last week about things related to the SDN World Congress event and what the activity there shows about the emerging SDN and NFV space. I’ve covered issues of deployment and management of complex virtualized systems, high-performance network data paths, and DPI as a service. For this, my last blog on…
One of the interesting things that emerged from the SDN World Congress was the multiplicity of roles associated with the concept we call “deep packet inspection” or DPI. Like almost everything in tech, DPI is being positioned or proposed in more missions than we have methodologies to support. I had an opportunity to spend quite…
Progress is always a combination of evolution and revolution, adaptation of the current situation for the next progressive step versus leaping boldly out of line and sprinting to the finish. Revolution provokes change and fright. Evolution provokes comfort and stagnation. Thus, as a practical matter, anything that gets announced could be viewed as either “revolutionary…
The future is one of those things that always gets ahead of us. Companies today are particularly challenged with futures because financial practices focuses them on quarterly results. Still, while the future may be redefined daily and may be hard to come to terms with, it’s either there for us all or we don’t have…
We’re getting some news that suggests that maybe we need to think not more about mobility, but less—in at least one sense. It’s not the mobile user that’s changing things, it’s the migratory user. Mobility means moving, and in terms of devices and services it means stuff directed at someone who is consuming on the…